Monday, December 5, 2011

That's a FACT!

How many days until Christmas break? Not that I'm counting down or anything...

Anyway! The past week or so, we have been focusing on Fact and Opinion. I wanted to find a super-duper-fantastic idea that would leave my kiddos begging for fact and opinion daily, but I came up short. Many google and pinterest searches came up inconclusive. So! I racked my brain and came up with an idea of my own. Shocker! I didn't know I was capable of this anymore.

I'm a big big BIG fan of anchor charts. I don't know what it is, but I love rallying the troops around the carpet and charting information on a piece of chart paper together. Maybe it's the second grade teacher in me. Anyway, I love it. My original plan was to create an anchor chart for fact and opinion, create our own definitions and write examples... blah blah. (I say "blah blah" like its a bad thing, but I still highly enjoy that idea!)

Using a bulletin board, I created a giant T-Chart with border and my cricut. One side labeled, "Fact" and the other "Opinion".

First, we ironed our own definitions of fact and opinion and wrote those on chart paper. Then, using sentence strips I modeled writing down an example of an opinion. My opinion statement was, "I believe the Grinch is the best Christmas movie, ever!" We discussed why this was my opinion and it couldn't be proven true. Then, I handed the sentence strips over to the kiddos and let them write! They were chomping at the bit to write down examples of facts and opinions. We were writing, stapling, writing examples, and stapling some more. It was super interactive and high energy in my classroom for the entire lesson!

Yes, 3x3=9

Eh, Football is okay!

Overall, it was a pretty fun lesson and now we have our stellar bulletin board to refer to. Anyone have any other great ideas for fact and opinion? Send them my way!

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5 comments:

Hey! I tie fact & opinion into Social Studies. We do a mini-study [just one lesson] on the history of our town, and they have to write a fact paragraph. Then, they get to write a paragraph about their town that is ALL opinion. It doesn't take more than 2 lessons & the kids like it! =)

I did something similar last year. Except for an opinion one student wrote, "Ms. Noren sucks." And his name was on it so it's not like I didn't know who wrote it!!! LOL it still is one of my fave stories from last year.

Your board looks great! I use persuasive texts to teach fact and opinion. We identify clue words for opinions (think, best, feelings), and we chart them. Then we read a persuasive article and record statements on notecards. We sort the statements into facts and opinions and talk about how the author used the facts to support his opinions.